Ah, yes, I was waiting for the Taliban to tell me which one of these two online clusterfucks to start using.

I’m surprised they even care about Twitter, wouldn’t they want to be underground?

Yep, especially for young people in the United States.

People have become so attached to “one place only for everything” that something as simple as blue/green bubbles (and associated service differences) will be enough to isolate.

The messiah of maximal convenience makes differentiation harder and harder for everyone.

(And for everyone who says “Everyone here just uses Telegram/Whatsapp/QQ/Line, not a problem over here!”, guess what, you’re still probably gonna be exclusionary to other services just like the blue/green folks. It just doesn’t happen to affect you.)

I hope to god you are right. What will truly be a revolution is if somehow these models can be transitioned to CPU-bound rather than GPU without completely tanking performance. Then we can start talking about running it on phones and laptops.

But I don’t know how much more you can squeeze out of the LLM stone. I’m surprised that we got what was essentially a brute-forcing of concepts, with massive catalogs of data, rather than one more hand-crafted/built from scratch. Maybe there is another way to go about? God I hope so, so OSS can use it before the big guys convince governments to drop the hammer.

And I disagree with it too. And it’s not because of how good the models are in technical terms, the corporate juggernauts are only just ahead of OSS on that front… it’s server space and the money to acquire it that is the moat.

An average internet user will not install the Vicunas and the Pygmalions and the LLaMAs of the LLM space. Why?

For one, the field is too complicated to get into, but, more importantly, a lot of people can’t.

Even the lowest complexity models require a PC + graphics card with a fairly beefy amount of VRAM (6GB at bare minimum), and the ones that can go toe-to-toe with ChatGPT are barely runnable on even the most monstrous of cards. No one is gonna shell out 1500 bucks for the 4090 just so they can run Vicuna-30B.

They are gonna use online, free-to-use, no BS, no technical jargon LLM services. All the major companies know that.

ChatGPT and services like it have made the expectation: “just type it in, get amazing response in seconds, no matter where”.

OSS can’t beat that, at least not right now. And until it can, the 99% will be in Silicon Valley’s jaws.